Ok, so as most of you (I hope) have realized by now, Karl has been awesome enough to trust me with hir baby for the everyday stuff. Unfortunately, some real life junk has prevented me from spending as much time here as I should've in the past little while, but I am here now and ready to roll!

We need to reinvigorate this board - I would be very sad to see such intellectual discussion lag just because members don't hear back for months at a time. Any ideas to liven up activity would be welcome, but I'd also like to ask every member here to make an effort to check in once in a while and respond to posts, as well as to tell their friends who might be interested in the site, in order to bring in new points of view.

I think, with a little elbow grease, that this board can be something extraordinary - but it will be a group effort from all of you who have such great capacities for critical thinking and curiosity. All together now!

For the first several months, Apositive really was a very interesting board that helped me a lot in thinking through issues. I'm not really sure why it's died down (maybe we've already discussed the issues that seemed most pressing to us at the time?.) One issue for me is that most of my time on asexuality related issues these days have been devoted to the asexoblogosphere (and another project as well that I don't talk about much.) I've been writing quite a lot there because a blog is a much better way than a forum when I have a lot to say on some issues. The downside is that it isn't all that great for generating discussion. A few people comment, but most of them are fellow bloggers. Also, a lot the reading I've been doing surrounding asexuality has been other blogs rather than forums.

I still comment on AVEN sometimes, but even that is really just a covert way of promoting Asexual Explorations which is not-so-covertly linked in my signature.

One thing that might generate some discussion would be to bring up new research on asexuality. (A new paper came out a month or two ago that has somehow gone almost entirely unnoticed other than a shout out on my blog and another on DJ's blog.)

I still check here for the occasional new post and I assume others do as well. I don't think the board's dead, it's just that nobody has posted anything. I read the new research article, and though it wasn't earthshattering, I guess it is fairly good academic press. I've been putting together some new thoughts about various things, which I'll write a post about at some point.

Maybe we could all be encouraged to post about little things that come up in our daily lives, whether it ends in a question or not -- somewhat in the manner of a blog post, but not so polished and published.

Also, it might be fun to discuss Shortland Street. I watched all of the Gerald episodes recently and thought they were great.

I think it's a bit catch-22 - people visit and see hardly any new content, so they stop visiting, which means there is even less new content.. and the stagnation continues. In order to generate some more traffic we need turnover of content. That will also push up search engine rankings (most of them hate stagnant sites and push them down the listings)

I'm all for reinvigorating discussion on here... I'll try and post as much as I can without it being nonsense

I think one of the issues this board faces is that when you get a bunch of sex-positive asexuals together who are able to discuss rather than fight, they talk about everything they want to discuss concerning sex, then it's all been talked about.

It seems to me that sex-positive asexuals may be a good portion of asexuals as a whole, but the ones likely to post at a forum like this would not be the easily squicked, or the ones who will never compromise, etc. Once you get down to the sex positive asexuals who have some curiousity about sex, you've weeded out a tremendous portion of the population. Not that that is a bad thing. The problem is that when the forum focuses on sex positive asexual issues, such a small community runs out of topics fast. And then the above things happen, where posts don't happen, then people stop showing up, and it dies. I think this is my first trip back here in months.

I suppose that getting a bunch of people to come on over and be all like, "S3x? Ewwww!!!!" would increase the discussion. But I believe that is what Q&A over on AVEN is for (among other things, of course.)

I guess that there was a lot of posting for the first several months because there were a lot of people who had already been at AVEN for a while and wanted a place to talk about asexuality that didn't have all of the asexon00bs asking the same questions because they didn't bother to read the FAQ (I feel like I should never, ever use that word again, and yet it's so tempting.) One of the issues is how fast the number of people wanting more in depth conversation that they don't get on AVEN is growing. When Apositive was formed, there were several years worth of such people. Now we seemed largely talked out.

I also wonder if the rising number of blogs has something to do with it. People may simply be going elsewhere for their more in-depth stuff. One topic that I'm really interested in talking about is people's ideas for future research on asexuality. But before I posted on it, Ily asked the exact same question, and that thread really didn't get anywhere. I think a few people have attempted to start threads with genuinely interesting topics, but there hasn't been much in the way of response.

pretzelboy wrote:I also wonder if the rising number of blogs has something to do with it.

I think that's true as far as I'm concerned. Whatever ideas I have tend to go into my blog, since I'm the only person responsible for it. On AVEN, I'm usually welcoming people, trying to reassure newbies, or posting pictures of cats. But if only the people that had blogs were contributing to a site, that wouldn't be very many people, either.

What I've learned from blogging is that controversial or angry posts always get the most response. Maybe it's the rational, well-thought-out discourse we've been having here that's the problem! Maybe we need some crazy outlandish topics? It's a thought...

Crazy and outlandish gets discussion anywhere. On a broad site like AVEN, there are enough fringe people that to someone one the board, liking cheese is outlandish.

Problem is, most of the people who talk on the crazy, outlandish stuff tend to be the type who are there to argue, rather than discuss; the "I'm right, what you say is wrong" types. And even when there is some topic that warrented in depth discussion, someone, whether it be the pro or anti-labelists, the pro or anti-sexuals, someone would come in and derail it to their usual preachy spiel.

Since one of the major holier-than-thou preachy groups (the anti-sexuals) is gone here (and my joining here was largely to escape them), we can have more in-depth, civil discussion. But, as has been said before, eventually everyone says what they have to say.

Dargon wrote:Problem is, most of the people who talk on the crazy, outlandish stuff tend to be the type who are there to argue, rather than discuss; the "I'm right, what you say is wrong" types. And even when there is some topic that warrented in depth discussion, someone, whether it be the pro or anti-labelists, the pro or anti-sexuals, someone would come in and derail it to their usual preachy spiel.

Yeah, it could be a quality/quantity thing. As brilliant as we all are, you can only really come up with so many intellegent comments per day (or maybe that's just me). But I think you can disagree with people on controversial topics without getting "Am so! Are not" etc. And it's more likely to happen on a site like this. But maybe part of the silence is due to the fact that we all agree with each other. I guess I should put my money where my mouth is and start one of those topics, but I'm not sure what...I have a hard time being controversial even if I try.